It’s time for West Sussex to fix the roads, Crawley Observer Column, Wednesday 3rd June 2026

There is an old two-panel political cartoon of a party activist confidently going to knock on a door surrounded by thought bubbles containing the kinds of issues national debates tend to focus on, but his face turns to surprise in the second panel when he discovers the voter instead raising bin collections, housing conditions and all the problems of day-to-day life.

The cartoon first appeared in a Social Democratic Party magazine as a joke, because every first-time campaigner has experienced the same learning curve, but it persists to this day in campaign presentations and on blogs for a reason: it is the voters who decide what politics is about.

When it comes to doorstep issues, potholes are one of the biggies. Whatever the claims about Weald clay, I don’t remember roads looking this bad when I was a child and isn’t hard to see why. Since Austerity began, county councils have regularly raided the highways budget to pay for other services to help cover funding gaps in other statutory services.

By the time of the General Election, there was an 11-year backlog in pothole repairs, with 4,700 miles of roads in poor condition in our region. Even with insufficient funding, councils still had choices over where the funding could be spent, and West Sussex regularly chose to allocate Crawley—with the most heavily used roads in the county—the fewest road repair schemes.

For as long as parties have contested West Sussex, the Conservatives have run the council for all bar four years. We now have a new progressive coalition running the county. I wish them well, but Crawley now expects them to deliver for us.

Since the General Election, Labour has put significantly more funding into local government, allocated over £322m for potholes in our part of the country, and more than tripled the share of local roads funding tied to transparency. Central government is clear: voters expect their roads to be repaired and we have allocated the funding needed, it is for councils to now do their bit of the job and deliver the repairs our roads deserve.